<div class="typewriter pleasuretransitions" style="padding-top: 3em;">
<div style="margin-left: 6em;top: 6em;position: absolute;" id="pleasure1">It is</div>
<div style="margin-left: 10em;position: absolute;top: 10em;" id="pleasure2_1" class="linktext forcetop">a pleasure</div>
<div style="margin-left: 10em;position: absolute;top: 10em;" class="linktext hide" id="pleasure2_2">your duty</div>
<div style="margin-left: 10em;position: absolute;top: 10em;" class="hide" id="pleasure2_3">your entire</div>
<div style="margin-left: 16em;position: absolute;top: 14em;" id="pleasure3_1" class="forcetop">to serve.</div>
<div style="margin-left: 16em;position: absolute;top: 14em;" class="linktext hide" id="pleasure3_2">[[reason for existence|Nightmare]].</div>
</div>
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%>[
CG: YEAH WELL I HATE YOU WAY MORE THAN I HATE MYSELF, AND THAT'S FUCKING SAYING SOMETHING.
]{.karkat-trollian.trollian}
[
CG: IN FACT I HATE YOU MORE THAN I HATE MYSELF AND YOU HATE YOURSELF AND YOU HATE ME COMBINED.
]{.karkat-trollian.trollian}
[
TA: oh fuck that noii2e iin every leakiing oriifiice iit2 got you know ii hate the combiined product of you and my2elf more than you could ever begiin two hate me and my2elf and you and your2elf on your wor2t day 2o FUCKIING DEAL WIITH IIT.
]{.sollux-trollian.trollian}
<div class="citationlink"><a href="http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=003927">— Troll Andrew Hussie. <i>In which four young members of a remarkably troll-like species are circumstantially confined to their hives.</i></a></div>
<h1 style="padding-top: 1em">Engine Song</h1>
<div style="padding-top: 4em">
This entertainment is intended for trolls aged 8 sweeps or older, as well as members of troll-aligned species who are over the equivalent age of majority in their jurisdictions.
<br><br>
[[Continue|It is a pleasure]]
</div>Data feeds whisper at the edges of your hearing, poisonous oracles promising disaster or deliverance. Readouts constantly flicker in the cluttered wireframe HUD, forcibly projected into your optic nerves. It would be the easiest thing in the world to organize the data feeds, to take responsibility for the starship and its two-thousand souls. You would be able to dissolve into the ship's systems, to *be* the ship — to be something its crew felt fondly about. You would be able to forget about your friends and stop hoping for a rescue.
That's the whole point of this, after all. Helmsman implants are expensive, starships even more so. Only an idiot would place an unconditioned helmsman at the heart of a starship. Before you can be permitted to fly, you must first be utterly broken.
[[> Resist|Nightmare 2]]
They have to know you were taken. The debris trail alone would have enough clues for TZ or NP to track your (heh heh) captors. But if the war's going badly, they may not be able to spare enough forces to rescue you. "The first duty of any prisoner is to resist," you remember KK preaching to the troops.
But it's hard. The last time you tried to hack their network, they took away all the feeds and left you in isolation. You don't know how long they kept you there, seeing nothing, feeling nothing. But it was long enough that when the simulation — and that's what it is, just a simulation — came back, you almost gave in out of relief.
<div><span class="linktext" id="resist1">> Resist</span></div>
<div class="container2 hidetransitions hide"><br>
It's getting so much harder. You don't know how long it's been, but you're sure you should have been rescued by now.
</div>
<div class="container2 hidetransitions hide"><br><span class="linktext" id="resist2">> Resist</span></div>
<div class="container3 hidetransitions hide"><br>
You can't let them win. You have to hold out.
</div>
<div class="container3 hidetransitions hide"><br><span class="linktext" id="resist3">> Resist</span></div>
<div class="container4 hidetransitions hide"><br>
Oh, what's the use.
</div>
<div class="container4 hidetransitions hide"><br>
[[> Give in|Nightmare 3]]
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%>It's just a quick diversion, you tell yourself. You have to do something, anything, to relieve the boredom. So you dive into the engine response feeds. You redline the engines at first, a little show of defiance, but the feedback leaks into every other feed, so you have to pull them back down.
<div><span class="linktext" id="next1">==></span></div>
<div class="container2 hidetransitions hide"><br>At your direction, readouts for the fusion plant and attitude thrusters line themselves up next to the status feeds from the hyperspace vanes. They're all wrong. Firing the thrusters above 14% with the vanes above one-quarter engaged is just wasting power, any idiot would know that. So you adjust them, and it all looks good, but then the fusion plant is generating too much power compared to the draw, so you have to damp that down again, and that affects the vane performance. It's actually an interestingly complicated system.
<br>
<br>[[==>|Nightmare 4]]
</div>
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%>You've just about got the power and propulsion systems configured properly when there's a directive from the bridge. `SET INTERCEPT COURSE FOR SYSTEM 87-B`. The directive includes a specified power curve that will take more monitoring than you want to do right now, so you modify it to something that will do the 13 light-sweep journey in nearly the same time but with a lot less grubsitting.
The moment you do, pain arcs across your head, as if you'd stuck your horns into a live circuit. You try closing the system controls, but they won't go away. You try redlining the engines again. You try changing just about everything, but the pain won't stop. Finally you change the configuration back to what the directive specified, and just like that, the pain goes away. No, not just goes away; you're feeling happy. You know your mental states. You shouldn't be feeling this happy. They're messing with your emotions even more.
[[==>|Nightmare 5]]More directives come in, at different intervals, sometimes giving you wide latitude to implement them, and sometimes specifying exact parameters. When you try exploiting the simulation again, you're punished with more pain even when you stop interfering and obey the directives. The pattern repeats itself and before long you find you're self-censoring any notion of hacking your way out. It's probably only hours later that you realize they're not even zapping you anymore; they just have to cut off the euphoria reward for obeying and you automatically make the corrections. You hate them for doing this to you. You hate KK and FF for not rescuing you. But you hate yourself even more. They — whoever they are — made you into this, but you helped. It's your own fault. You deserve this.
[[==>|Wake up 1]]<%
story.checkpoint()
%>
You thrash around, knocking your knuckles against the walls of your recuperacoon. Your breathing slowly returns to normal. It's been a whole equinox since KK's strike team burst into the facility where you were being held, but you keep having the same dream, and the others are starting to notice you're not all right.
[[> Figure out a solution|Ranting 1]]Hey, idiot, you're dreaming again.
[[> Wake up|Wake up 2]]_Nights in the future, but not many._
"What the everbleeding fuck," Karkat fairly shouts, "is that?"
It's a stupid question. He knows what he's looking at, even with the modifications youve made. "I don't know, KK, but it looks to me like a helmsman conditioning rig." It is, in fact, the rig you were sealed inside when he stormed the asteroid fortress to rescue you. In the past few nights, it has undergone substantial alterations by Equius's hands and at your direction. For one thing, it's been turned inside out so that the induction candidate must hang in the open, suspended by his own psionics. Secondly, the neurostimulator used to be situated over the candidate's head, rather than his genitals. "I've made some changes that I think you'll find very interesting." He sputters protests, but you talk over him. "Don't tell me you've forgotten _Fleet Fantasies 16: Jermak Gets A Captain_. I thought that was one of your very favorite vids."
[[==>|Ranting 2]]
Karkat waves his hands as if to wave the rig away somehow. "We saved you, Sollux! You don't have to be a helmsman. And if you're throwing away what I did just for _this_, then fuck you and fuck me for caring."
And that's when you laugh in spite of yourself. He's never had the caste-specific schoolfeeding. He's never had dreams of service poured into his brainpan, never had a serial number assigned to him. "You still don't get it, KK? It's in my blood. Yellowbloods are _bred_ for this, and once you start you don't just stop."
"So that's it? Bye bye Sollux Captor, hello _SS Bulgefuck_? You can't ask me to turn you into a ship, Sollux, you just can't." He's almost crying now.
"I have to finish this. You know me; I've never been one for half measures. And I can't go back. I'm going to finish it on my own terms. I need your help to get through this and still be myself."
[[==>|Ranting 3]]
He swallows, hard. "Why me?" he asks, and his voice is small and quiet.
"I couldn't ask AA. She's a helming caste too. I can't do that to her. If I asked FF, she'd freak out just like you're doing and try to find some way to talk me out of it. And frankly, EQ doesn't want anything to do with my bulge that doesn't involve keeping it out of ED's nook." You pause and let that sink in. "You hate me enough to do it properly, and you care enough to keep me from fucking it up. It has to be you," you tell him. "Someone else would just get it wrong."
His jaw unclenches, and he sticks his balled-up fists into his pockets. "Fine. But I need some time. I need to read up about this."
You know as well as he does that his "research" is going to involve a lot more volumes of _Starship Pals_ than he wants to admit owning, but that's ok. You've read them all too.
[[==>|Elevator 1]]He comes for you when you're fast asleep. He has a security drone with him and the set of inhibitor cuffs you gave him. If you'd known, you would have made it easy on him, would've slept with both arms draped out of the 'coon. Instead he has to clasp one cuff on you, then get the drone to lever you out of the sopor. To your horror, your other hand has gotten halfway into your nook in your sleep and there's a squelching sort of sound as the drone pulls you out of yourself and finishes cuffing you. Come on, Captor, keep it together for two fucking seconds, or there probably won't _be_ fucking seconds. Heh.
Karkat taps his huskpad and with a tingle from the cuffs, up your arms to your spine, and from there to the tips of your horns, your powers come alive under his direction. You can still feel your precise location in the room, relative to everything else, but it's muted now. You sag limply to the floor when the drone releases you, only to pop back up under Karkat's remote control. He dismisses the security drone, then floats you ahead of him, out the door and down the hall to the elevator. You keep quiet until the doors close, at which point you burst out "KK, what the *fuck*?"
[[==>|Elevator 2]]
He spins you around to face him and you realize he's wearing his threshecutioner uniform, the one Kanaya made for him during the early days of the insurrection. "Candidate Captor, your services are required by the Empire. Your assessment of my performance is neither required nor permitted," he says coldly. Then he nearly melts and looks you straight in the eye. "This is okay, right, Sollux? If it's not okay or if I do something wrong, you need to tell me. You have to say, uh, 'grubsauce', ok?"
You nod. "Do it, KK," you tell him. The concern drops back below the mask of Threshecutioner Vantas, still visible if you know where to look, but not distracting. He's so hot when he's like this, running on the edge of self-control. It almost makes you want to push and see what'd happen, but right now you have other needs.
[[==>|Entry]]<%
story.checkpoint()
%>
The elevator doors open on the bay where you left the conditioning rig. Karkat's added a few decorations of his own: a simple folding chair and a side table with a tray full of the kind of sex toys you find in a helmstech's workbag. Your bulge does a little quiver at the thought of those tools being put to use on you. This is about as far from fuzzy handcuffs and bullet vibes as you can get; helmsmen are equipment and the design of these tools only reinforces that fact. Where the fuck did he even get them?
You barely react at all as Karkat floats you into the rig and straps you in; you're still coming to terms with this being real. This is really happening, right now, to you. Then he clamps the HUD over your face and you're back in the simulated ship, halfway between Nowhere and Fuckall. This time around you can still feel your body, which is good because Karkat's got both hands on your grubscars and you're starting to get a little wriggly down below.
"You're going to be a good ship for me," he whispers at the edge of your hearing and you can't decide if you want to curse at him or tell him to stick it in already.
[[> Yell at the fuckass]]
[[> Tell him where he can put his bulge]]
[[> Safeword|Safeword (early)]]"Grubsauce," you mutter, both in sadness at giving up so quickly and relief that it's over, at least for now. Karkat lets out a breath you hadn't even known he was holding and hits a button on his huskpad. The rig opens up and the cuffs drop off. You sink the the floor.
Before you know it, Karkat's helping you to your feet. "I'm sorry, Sollux. I fucked up; I'm sorry."
"Fuck that," you tell him. "I guess I couldn't handle it. It's not your fault, KK. And before you ask, of course we're still friends." You have to help him back up to the residential deck. Maybe in the future you'll come back to this, but for now what you two have together is more important."Hey, fuck you very much," you yell as loud as you can despite the conditioning rig's limiters on your vocal cords. "I'm not _your_ ship; I'm _my_ ship."
Karkat reaches over and flips on the neurostimulator. You feel a spasm up your nook as it locks onto the nerves in your groin, and then a jab of white-hot fire as he thumbs it up a few notches and back down again. You can't scream, you can't twitch free, you can't do anything except gasp for breath, for anything to distract you from the pain.
"Let's try that again," Karkat says softly. "I'm Threshecutioner Vantas and I'm your shipwright. Even the stupidest baby wigglers can figure out that this means you're my ship." He strokes your thorax and a frisson goes through you at his touch. "I'm going to make sure you're the very best ship you can be."
[[==>|Starship 1]]"Ooh yeah, baby, stick it in, stick it in," you simper in your best mockery of a respiteblock voice. "I'm so wet for you right now."
"Fuck you, that's disgusting, you're disgusting," Karkat replies. "Did your lusus teach you to talk like that?" His hand drifts down along your thigh and one blunted claw prods at the edge of your nook. You try to thrust toward his hand, but the rig holds you too firmly. "Let's get you cleaned up." He takes his hand away and picks something up from his table of toys. "This has a long official name but I never really bothered to learn it, ship. I just like to call it the nookbot." He flicks a switch and with a whine, the mechanical nookworm simulator writhes its way into you. It's cold, almost as cold as Feferi's bulge but nowhere near as thick, and as it vacuums up your arousal fluid it leaves you wanting more. For a few minutes Karkat watches quietly as you hang there and moan, every twitching feeling amplified by the nookbot's feedback. When it turns itself off and falls into Karkat's waiting hand, you feel almost hollowed out and ready for anything.
[[==>|Starship 1]]Karkat taps another button on his huskpad and the simulated ship falls away from you, replaced by something entirely new. You wrote the code for this yourself, but you're still amazed at how good it feels when the station's feeds fill your sensorium. Nine hundred living, breathing, fighting trolls light up the life support streams. The solar wind batters your hull sensors and you nearly squint away from the light of the system's primary before you realize that's not a concern for you anymore. You even have video feeds of the interior, particularly the work bay where Karkat stands in front of your silly little meat body. He's hunched over his huskpad. He looks so small like this, but he's solidly built. He must be working out. "Orders?" you ask over the bay's speaker system. For once you're enunciating properly; no flesh to lisp with.
By way of reply he flips another switch in the software you set up for him. Engine controls make themselves known to you, along with the vane readouts. They're just simulated; this station isn't capable of anything more energetic than maintaining its orbit. You nudge the thrusters online; nothing big, nothing fast, but enough to give you a sense of how they'll react. The hacked simulation takes over the station feeds, adjusting them for your virtual movement. It all still works. You laugh over the speakers. Yeah, you're gonna be the best there ever was: the first ship who can improve his own operating system.
[[==>|Starship 2]]Karkat sets aside the huskpad and leans over your body. "Ship, take us up to one-third on the sublight thrusters. Set course for home." You don't need any programmed emotions to love the feeling of flying through the interlocking gravity wells of the six planets in this system, up and out toward a distance where your hyperdrive vanes will be useful as more than very effective brakes. In a real ship this would take hours, but you've sped the sim up considerably. In just moments you're free of the system and aimed at deep space, so you engage the vanes and fall into that higher-dimensional space where the light of other universes speeds you on your way.
[[==>|Starship 3]]The perennial question in the _Starship Pals_ fandom when you were growing up was "Can one ever really know what it's like to _be_ a starship, I mean really?" With the aid of the conditioning rig you've modified, you're pretty sure the answer is "hell fucking yes". You're loving it. This is a kind of freedom you never had, even when you were six and your biggest concern was figuring which asshat to troll on Troll 4chan. You drop out of hyperspace near Alternia and amuse yourself with dodging and destroying all the battlestations the old Empress left in the system. It's the most fun you've had in sweeps, and you're not paying any attention to your body anymore, which is why you're caught by surprise when your bulge shoots all the way out of its sheath and into Karkat's waiting hand. It looks like he figured out some of the more interesting settings on the neurostimulator.
[[==>|Bulge 1]]<%
story.checkpoint()
%>
"Now that I have your attention, ship, we're going to have to do a diagnostic routine," Karkat says in about as relaxed a voice as he can ever manage. "I have to make sure you're in working order, so please pay attention and tell me what you feel." He curls the tip of your bulge around his thumb, then makes a fist, trapping it. Then he leans over and licks all the way from tip (well, just about) to sheath.
"Oh fuck, KK, do that again," you say. Maybe it's the neurostimulator's settings, maybe it's just the context, but it felt pretty amazing.
He pinches your bulge tip painfully. "You are to call me Threshecutioner, or Shipwright." You didn't even know he could get stern like this.
"Okay," you squeak. "Shipwright, that feels really good. I want more." And yeah, you really do. You feel like you could do this for hours.
[[==>|Bulge 2]]He strokes your bulge, letting it coil around his hand. He's viscid with your bulgefluid by the time he untwines himself from you. Your pulse is pounding. If you could move, you'd be thrusting your bulge back into his hand, but you can't; it just hangs there, twitching in search of something to slide into. He ignores it. Instead, he puts the tip of a finger just at the edge of your nook, which somehow becomes even wetter. Your nook opens for him and he makes a fist.
[[> Relax and enjoy it]]
[[> Safeword|Safeword (later)]]Even as slick as you are, he can't get his whole fist in unless he narrows it, curls his fingers tightly together and wiggles his way inside you. "That's a good ship," he says softly. "You're so good to me."
You can feel your nook reacting to the enzymes your bulge left on his hand and starting to let down your genetic material. You could warn him, but that'd spoil the fun a bit. "God, Shipwright, keep doing that," you find the breath to say.
Now that his whole hand is inside you, he closes his fist again to something small and round and powerful. All the stars are raining adoration on your hull and the whole of your attention is centered on this gorgeous little ball of rage and pity who's doing his best to make you come for him. It's amazing.
[[==>|Relax 2]]
All of a sudden you realize you need to stop. "Grubsauce," you tell him urgently, feeling silly as you do. As he promised, he stops immediately; wipes off his hands on a cloth and undoes your cuffs. You float to the ground.
Karkat looks hurt. "Did I do something wrong?" he asks. "I thought you were into this." You can't figure out how to explain it to him right now, so you just grab him and hold on. Instantly he pulls you close and hugs you. "We can do something else," he says. "We'll figure it out." He keeps babbling until you put a finger over his mouth.
"It's not about you, KK," you tell him before he starts blaming himself again. "I thought this was right for me, but it's not, not exactly. Thanks for helping me through it."
He laughs a little. "Like I'm gonna pass up a chance to show you what you mean to me," he says, burying his head in your shoulder again. Behind you, the rig goes into idle mode. You'll deal with that later.
Yeah, life is pretty good.You're out of words to say, right now, and that's a marvel of its own, but you route your subvocalizations out of body and into the speaker system. The sounds fill the bay, and now Karkat's at the center of what he's doing to you. You moan for him and he lets out his own susurration in response, and fuck if it doesn't make your entire body want to sing for him. He's slowly pulling out of you and then coming back in, and you're on the edge and you ride it for as long as you can, to imprint this perfect moment of high flight on your fallible excuse for a databank. And then the moment's complete, version 2.0, and as a torrent of genetic material pours out around his fist you scream "yes, yes, fucking yes". And this time you don't lose yourself in flight or in system management, but in all the fragile and complicated feelings of your body.
[[==>|Relax 3]]Karkat's already undone the cuffs by the time you come back to yourself. He's wincing and feeling his hand where you clenched it tightly. It's stained so yellow you don't think he's going to get it clean for days. You grin and drop to the ground. "Hey, KK, you did good."
His eyes light up from just that bit of praise. "Really? I thought..." but you cut him off.
"Yeah, but that only means you set the bar higher for next time." You're not sure you like the expression he makes at that; you're going to have to fill his moirail in on this whole thing sooner rather than later, but that's a problem for after you both get some rest. "Thanks," you tell him. "I mean it. Now go on; I'll clean this up."
He turns to go, but pauses and looks back at you. "'Next time'? I thought this was supposed to fix you." He really does wear his emotions on his sleeve.
"I told you, KK, this is part of me now. But with you as a Shipwright, things are gonna be ok." Then you chase him out of the bay so you can start work on the next iteration of the software. It's gonna be so great. Really, between his feelings and your smarts, how could it not?